by Kia Corthron
He’s always the first to arrive, last to leave. After he climbs to the third and top floor where his small office/broom closet is tucked away and sets down his jacket and shoulder bag, he rolls out his cleaning cart and takes the freight elevator down to the first floor. He vacuums the administrative offices, emptying the wastebaskets. Then he moves on to the bathrooms: filling the soap dispensers, replenishing the toilet paper, and on the second floor where the older girls are he empties the sanitary napkin receptacles. He finishes around eight, then goes outside to gather any after-school playground litter—a pink sweater and plastic ball for Lost and Found. He notices a screw loose on the swing set and tightens it. Between 8:15 and 8:30 the teachers materialize, most of them waving and smiling at Dwight in greeting. A few don’t wave. A few are suspicious of the custodian, knowing his history, but most of the faculty consider themselves progressive, all about granting second chances.
As time moves closer to nine the children begin arriving, many of them waving with innocent exuberance, “Hi, Mr. Campbell!” Dwight smiles and waves back.
After the late bell he works alone again, oddly feeling the guilt-giddiness of a kid who’s supposed to be in school but is not, some Pavlovian ingrained response. On his way back inside a little white girl comes running out to find him, trying to suppress her pride at being chosen for the important mission of conveying a directive to the janitor. “Mr. Campbell, Heather Addlewood threw up in Mrs. Eisentrout’s class!”
“Okay, I’m comin.” The child runs back in, wishing to beat Dwight so she would be able to make the crucial announcement of his impending arrival before his appearance rendered her proclamation moot. Dwight had been hoping puke patrol would be over by the end of February. He prays this isn’t the start of some school-wide epidemic.
He enters Mrs. Eisentrout’s classroom armed with cleaners and disinfectant, the students mysteriously missing. He has no trouble locating the soiled area, the stench greeting him instantly, the third-row desk overflowing with the gunk. The teacher is writing on the board today’s schedule for her fifth grade.
“Thank goodness they had music first thing and I could send them all to the auditorium. Little hard to keep their minds on long division when the room reeks of upchuck.” She shakes her head. “The nurse called her mother. Why do they send their kids to school sick?”
Dwight shakes his head in sympathy and in something like solidarity, except as he is alone in wiping up the revolting muck he has no real sense that he and Mrs. Eisentrout are in this together. He’s finishing the task when he notices something carved into the adjacent desk. It will be his job to take a scraper and rub it out. He’ll bring that tool with him when he does such chores after dismissal, but for now he shows the graffito (the word’s singular form he’d learned when once given a citation for such an infraction) to Mrs. Eisentrout.
The teacher sighs. “I’ll talk to him.”
At 10:30 Dwight goes back to his office, taking from his bag his reading glasses and a paperback, Song of Solomon. He sits at his well-worn wooden table, an ancient high school student desk. When this job was offered to him last summer, he was informed of the irregular hours. Some work needs to be performed before the start of the school day, other tasks post-dismissal, so the schedule was Monday through Friday 7 to 10 and noon to 5. When he asked for a slight adjustment, 7 to 10:30 and 12:30 to 5 so he could finish his hour-long 11 a.m. meeting, the principal was kindly accommodating. The Presbyterian Church is just a five-minute walk away so at 10:50 he closes his book and gets up to leave, always making sure he’s a little early to allow for any unexpected delays because at eleven the room is locked and not unlocked until the meeting is over.
There are nineteen in the circle, various genders and races and sexual orientations. The space is already filled with cigarette smoke. They sit quietly, the attention of the room moving around to the left, all who wish to take a turn speaking, all who speak respecting the three-minute limit. When the person to his right begins to utter quietly, Dwight’s heart starts pounding, hearing little in anticipation of his own turn.
“My name is Dwight, and I’m an addict. Some of you regulars know it would take too long for me to list all the drugs, let’s just say I did em all, OD’d twice on speed, three times smack, every day I’m grateful, every day aware a the miracle I’m still here.” He is momentarily silent. “I haven’t dropped acid in three or four years. But I just had a flashback. My great-aunt was lynched, that’s not the drugs, that’s the truth. Well she just talked to me through the mailbox.” He laughs softly. “I think this is related to the fact that my nephew is comin to stay with me for the summer. He just graduated from college, wants to go to law school like his daddy, my brother. Over the years I’d receive the occasional correspondence from him, hardly ever did I reply but he never gave up on his uncle, never—” He swallows. “He’s got it all together. I haven’t seen him since he was a little boy, haven’t heard his voice in years. But that letter. You just feel it. Confidence.” He takes a breath. “I’m scared. I haven’t been around family in a while. Been clean two years, I don’t wanna go back and oh God I don’t wanna go back in fronta—” Wiping an eye. “When he asked could he come I thought no, no, no. And then. He’s all grown up. I say no now, might never get another chance.” Looking at the floor, he smiles. “I think my sponsor and I will remain in very close contact till September.”
He’s back at his office by 12:05. He spends the last twenty-five minutes of his break reading while partaking of his habitual packed lunch: egg salad sandwich with an orange for dessert. On days when he volunteers to clean up after the meeting, he gets back with just five minutes to devour his meal. He doesn’t mind these service tasks, even emptying the ashtrays despite the fact that he is in the minority as a nonsmoker. Nicotine was certainly among his numerous vices for many years, but he’d made a pact with himself when he finally decided once and for all to give up chemical addictions that it would be all chemicals.
He sweeps the floor and stage of the auditorium, then mops before rolling out the several dollies on which are folded hundreds of metal chairs, the smaller ones for the little children to be placed in front. Not easy to make neat lines with seats of such assorted sizes but Dwight takes pride in the orderliness of his aisles and rows.
At 1:45 the students start flowing in. Dwight stands at the back and is as mesmerized as the small children by the Chinese acrobats. (The fifth graders are the oldest, and are divided between those gladly giving into the experience and those trying to maintain a cool distance.) In addition to their astounding gymnastics, the performers present mind-boggling tricks with props, such as the woman who tosses saucer, cup, saucer, cup, saucer, cup on top of her head, pitching them without seeing, each new dish landing perfectly balanced on top of the others until there are ten sets. With every new demonstration Dwight holds his breath, worried for the tumblers and jugglers, their humiliation should a blunder occur. And one does, an exhibition with stacked chairs, someone slipping off, but the man merely catches himself and without missing a beat remounts, and the stunt is resumed to its breathtaking finish. Dwight smiles. Mistakes needn’t be catastrophes.
One of the second graders sitting at a middle aisle seat is a spellbound black child, and in his expression of eager delight a memory is sparked in Dwight, of coming to Indianapolis for a visit and taking Rett to the circus. The boy was seven, and Dwight never would have guessed it would be the last time he would see him until this coming summer. A decade later the uncle would become disgusted after learning of the abusive treatment of circus animals, but at the time it had seemed that nothing in years had made him so happy as seeing the enchantment on his nephew’s face while he stared at the dancing elephants. Afterward they went to an ice cream parlor, and as they sat at the table Dwight taught Rett to draw a three-dimensional box starting with two overlapping rectangles. The child laughed, jubilant, making boxes over and over, squealing every time he had s
uccessfully rendered one, and Dwight had laughed, kissing and embracing Eliot’s son until finally Rett had to squirm away in order to create his eighth box.
When the assembly is over, Dwight applauds enthusiastically, the curtain call concomitant with the dismissal bell, and the custodian slips out quickly, hearing (after he has made his own escape) teachers yelling at the children for order amid the mad rush for the exit. In his office, he takes the marble composition book out of his bag. He has had memory lapses lately and when a moment comes back to him, such as the Rett circus story, something he hasn’t thought about in years, he writes it down so that he will have preserved the recollection before it vanishes forever. By the time he’s through logging his entry the building has fallen silent, and he walks down to the auditorium to fold and bus the chairs. Afterward he begins his regular Friday afternoon erasing and washing of the classroom chalkboards and is surprised to find Mrs. Eisentrout hasn’t bolted for the weekend like the rest of the faculty but is still at her desk, grading papers.
“I took Kevin Winters aside and told him what you found. He was cantankerous as ever, but after I had a few choice words with him I did get some kind of grudging apology.”
Dwight had forgotten about the offensive defacement. He walks to the desk.
Dwight proceeds to rub the words into oblivion.
2
Saturday morning Dwight sits at his drafting table making the finishing touches. He had mentioned in one of his meetings his history with underground comics, and Mervin, an addict who had successfully turned his life around, had taken an interest. The black businessman had commissioned Dwight to imagine some sort of poster that could be displayed around the city and that targeted “us.” Recently the virus, the ghastly existence of which no one could any longer deny, had finally been given a proper name: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. (The first draft of the appellation from months before, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, had been pitifully inaccurate regarding the wide range of victims, ultimately proving more effective at raising the level of homophobia than of consciousness.)
The significance of prophylactics in prevention of the disease has been a major breakthrough discovery as, even a year ago, Dwight and many he knew were making wild hysterical stabs at the epidemic’s cause. (The club sex-enhancement drug “poppers”?) Dwight’s concept is a cartoon of Shaft and Superfly getting into bed together, a one-night stand. Shaft wants to use a condom but Superfly doesn’t. Referencing the theme songs of each, Shaft says, “The problem with you is the only game you know is do or die!” and, halfway through the comic, Superfly turns to the reader to say, “Wow—he is a complicated man!”
At 10:45 Dwight slips the prototype into his portfolio and walks over to the church. He is gratified by his commissioner’s enthusiastic response to the model, Mervin rattling off all the places he plans to post the placards.
An hour and a half later, Dwight sits at the bus stop in the late spring sun. Saturday mornings he reads or sketches in his apartment, on nicer days a park, and after his 11 a.m. meeting he partakes in a quick lunch at his favorite taquería, then walks or rides the bus to a museum or gallery. He invariably tops off his outing with an early dinner in Chinatown before going home to retire for the evening. Routine, routine.
On the bus he stares out at the cars. He misses driving. The second to last time he was behind a wheel was in September of ’75, when his Nova swerved and rammed into a guardrail. It was his final DUI, license revoked. He had never been entirely certain if this sentence was for life but, given the recently established harsher penalties for drunk driving, had been reluctant to go to the DMV for verification on the point.
His last time driving was in May of ’79. He had just been soothed by a hit after nearly twenty-four hours of a violent withdrawal, and took out the envelope he’d been carrying in his pocket since the end of April. Something had prevented Dwight from severing all ties with family. This, and perhaps some holdover from being a mailman, had resulted in him always maintaining a post office box, the rental of which being the only bill he paid faithfully each month, even if it meant skipping illegal substances for a day and undergoing the terrible sickness.
The card, liberally smudged from Dwight’s repeated fingering, announced Rett’s high school graduation in two weeks. In his medicated state, Dwight focused on the pretentious archaic font his nephew’s high school administrators had chosen, the eff-looking esses, when he heard something on the television and raised his eyes. A public interest story about a boy who had had a difficult beginning that he had overcome, an exemplary law student who would speak at the UCLA closing exercises the following day. Dwight had stared at the screen long after the two-minute segment was over. He switched the box off and walked the two miles to Keith’s, pushing the buzzer. The proprietor was home. Dwight climbed to the third and top floor, saw that the apartment door had been set ajar, and walked in to find Keith on the couch facing the door, glaring at his visitor.
“I jus need a shower. An my suit.”
Keith didn’t blink. Dwight collected a towel and washcloth from the linen closet and went into the bathroom to cleanse himself, something he hadn’t thought to do in some time. When he emerged three-quarters of an hour later, the towel wrapped around his waist and legs, he walked to the small closet that had become the storage unit for Dwight’s stuff. Now Keith was turned away, staring at the television though it wasn’t turned on. A new TV, Dwight noticed, as the previous one had disappeared along with various other of Keith’s belongings, pawned by Dwight for drugs. Hanging in the closet was Dwight’s only suit, the one he reserved for funerals, and some decent shoes. He left a few minutes later without uttering another word, Keith still turned away from him.
It was around one in the morning when he walked to the quiet, residential neighborhood. He selected the car, a Chrysler Newport, hot-wired it, and drove it to the PCH going south. He kept a bit of narcotic in his system to maintain equilibrium, prevent the nausea, but, as best he could, this day he wanted to be sober. The blue Pacific to his right seemed to wink its approval.
He entered the Los Angeles city limits and took the 405 to Downtown. A mile from campus he finally found street parking, then walked to the university grounds where he discovered thousands in various lines. After he located the ceremony for which he had come, he strategically waited until he spied a large black family and fell in with them in the swiftly moving queue, preparing to slip in on their ticket. As it turned out, the law school commencement was open, requiring no prior reservation.
The seating was outside, the announcements of special awards and honorary degrees seeming to drag on for hours. At long last Maxwell Williams was introduced. Though Dwight had a relatively decent view of the handsome young man, he was grateful to have caught a better glimpse of him on television the night before. Even with the sound system reverb, he did not miss a word of the address.
In February of 1960, four black students from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College began to sit in at the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter. It was by no means the first such civil rights action in the South, but it set off a year-long epidemic of similar demonstrations from Richmond to Nashville to Houston. In April 1960, students from Shaw University in Raleigh held a conference that soon gave birth to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
And on March 31st of that year, seven-year-old Jordan Price and nine-year-old me played a kissing game with a couple of little white girls that exploded into a local cataclysm and an international clamor. The state of Georgia in all its wisdom had planned to incarcerate us until adulthood. In those pre-Gault days when youth were afforded no due process, coupled with Bible Belt racism, we were helplessly at the mercy of a judge’s whim, and we may well have served out that verdict if it weren’t for the public outrage and the miraculous entrance into our lives of attorneys of extraordinary courage and fortitude. Their choice to petition for a habeas corpus was bo
ld, and when their initial attempt failed they immediately filed for appeal, and three months later Jordan and I were released. Thus I stand here today, a graduate of one of the finest law schools in the country, and without a doubt I owe not only my youth and freedom but my life’s ambition to my family and to those four lawyers, grown-ups to me then, but now I fully comprehend how young and fierce they were. All of them still in their twenties, three younger than I am now. They were: Deirdre Wilcox, Diana Rubin, Steven Netherton, and Eliot Campbell.
He then elaborated, praising each of them individually in the order he had introduced them, and with Max’s first sentence about Eliot, Dwight was already wiping his eyes.
When Max’s speech, which drew a standing ovation, was over, Dwight wished to slip out but, not being close to an aisle, it was impossible. As he glanced about restlessly, he snatched a profile two rows ahead. He held his gaze, hoping telepathically to force her to turn to him, he was almost certain it was she but he hadn’t yet gotten a clear look. When tassels were being moved to the left twenty minutes later, he watched her stand and it was unmistakable. She was rushing in the direction of the podium, no doubt to catch Max before he disappeared into the throng, and in a panic he called her name. She kept moving, and then he was rudely jumping chairs, pushing through parents Excuse me, Excuse me, “Didi!”
And now she heard, and turned around, staring at him, stunned. Then slowly breaking into a smile, her eyes glistening.
“Dwight.” He had caught up with her, and she reached out to hold his hands firm and warm, no other words coming to her but to repeat it. “Dwight.”
